W@CT | November 12 | What Counts as Learning? Open Digital Badges in Higher Ed

November 12 | What Counts as Learning? Open Digital Badges in Higher Ed. Sheryl Grant, Director of Social Networking for the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning initiative and Lucas Blair, founder of Little Bird Games LLC. What are open digital badges? They are portable, transferable, information-rich credentials that bundle learning into one click, and can be issued by traditional and non-traditional institutions of learning alike. In this presentation, we¿ll describe what open digital badges are, how they connect curricular and non-curricular learning, and how they can be implemented in higher education. We will also discuss real world examples that touch on the institutional, technical, cultural, social, and economic obstacles, opportunities, imperatives, and liabilities of an openly networked and alternative credentialing system.Sheryl Grant is Director of Social Networking for the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning initiative, and a Phd student at UNC-Chapel Hill where she is studying value-driven digital badge system design. Lucas Blair is the founder of Little Bird Games LLC, a serious game development company, which specializes in educational and therapeutic games. He received a M.S. in Instructional Technology from Bloomsburg University and a PhD in Modeling and Simulation from the University of Central Florida.